Unless you're willing to test blindly on humans that's not going to change. Our understanding of animal physiology is not purely selfish either, veterinary medi

Unless you're willing to test blindly on humans that's not going to change. Our understanding of animal physiology is not purely selfish either, veterinary medicine doesn't exist without animal testing. Besides that, the IRB handles research approval in the US and has very stringent requirements for animal research that increase exponentially depending on the model organism. Saying that they're being tortured carries some heavy implications—rodents only live a year or two to begin with and regulations exist for things like housing them in pairs. If I do research for a few months and then need to harvest brain slices I'm not exactly cutting down the rat in its prime + relative to the NYC rats fighting over a slice of pizza it lived a much nicer life. I'm vegetarian personally and think we should reduce unnecessary suffering, however the 1% of animal deaths in our society going to the furtherment of knowledge seems like the wrong focus to have. You mentioned you're vegan; if you can't get your peers to stop eating animals (which is totally unnecessary, unhealthy, bad for the planet) I'm not sure how you realistically expect them to line up in place of Remy the rodent for research purposes. Even then, there's a limit to what you can do non-invasively with where our medical knowledge is currently. My hope is that we refine what the research priorities are in our society + eliminate things like cosmetic testing, but ultimately I don't see an end to medical model organisms unless we can simulate them—and that's hard to do without further medical experimentation.